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October 28 -- Once we passed Whiskey Pete's, a tawdry castle-turned-casino/hotel where rooms go for $36 a night, I got my first glimpse of Ivanpah, the world's largest solar project, which cost $2.6 billion to build. The contrast between the two structures near the California-Nevada border some 50 miles south of Las Vegas was stunning. Ivanpah, a solar-thermal system jointly owned by Google, BrightSource Energy, and NRG, uses more than 300,000 mirrors (technically called heliostats) to concentrate the sun's energy. The futuristic project will begin generating electricity by year's end for 140,000 California homes. >>View Article